Posted on 12/02/2006 8:47:22 AM PST by Rummyfan
Contemplating the cover of “The Man Who Saved Britain”—Sean Connery, wearing a tuxedo and a sadistic smile, caressing his cheek with his Walther PPK, as a nubile underclad 1960s dolly bird somewhere down at crotch-height nuzzles against his upper thigh…
Where was I? Oh, yes. Bond, James Bond. Contemplating the cover of “The Man Who Saved Britain,” you’re struck by the apparent ingenuity of Simon Winder’s concept: It is weird, when you think about it, that the great enduring iconic figure of the Cold War, the very embodiment of the espionage profession, should be a Brit. The country was, after all, pretty peripheral in the vanquishing of communism and indeed at the height of the Soviet threat was lapsing into a grim Brezhnevite decay of its own. And even the dolly birds were more honored in the breach: If Kim Philby & Co. are anything to go by, Her Majesty’s Secret Service was in real life inclined more toward Plenty O’Toole than Pussy Galore.
And yet, if one were to say the words “secret agent” to almost anyone within range of Western popular culture this past half-century, he or she would conjure a suave Englishman (mostly played by Scotsmen, Welshmen, Irishmen and Australians) ordering martinis and shagging his way around the world on behalf of a nation all but shagged out. President Bush implicitly endorsed this curious pre-eminence in his notorious 16 words from the 2003 State of the Union address: “The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
Well, of course. And how would they learn that? The CIA, with the unlimited resources of the hyperpower, had merely sent in Joseph C. Wilson IV to sip mint tea in Niger with retired bureaucrats for a few days: Double-oh-IV, licensed to kill time. London no doubt dispatched Bond to break into the presidential palace and run around the basement laboratory shooting huge numbers of extras in Reynolds Wrap catsuits while still finding 10 minutes for a vigorous encounter with some appealingly dusky West African totty. 007 was always an equal-opportunity sex fiend, long before it was fashionable…
Where was I? Oh, yes. Bond, James Bond. Simon Winder’s thesis is that 007 is both a reflection of and an escape from imperial decline: “I want to convey, perhaps in an overdrawn form, some of the ways in which Britain has changed—and by following James Bond show some of a vanished world which he in various ways pulled together.”
Sounds fun, and Mr. Winder would seem the ideal chap to do it. A few years back, he compiled a lovely anthology called “My Name’s Bond…” rounding up Ian Fleming’s best soundbites from the 007 novels. There are an awful lot of them, not least from “Casino Royale”:
“‘A dry Martini,’ he said. ‘One. In a deep champagne goblet.’ “‘Oui, monsieur.’ “‘Just a moment. Three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it’s ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon-peel. Got it?’ "‘Certainly, monsieur.’ The barman seemed pleased with the idea.”
Unlike the new movie, which dispenses with Bond’s fastidiousness in such matters. “My Name’s Bond…” is one of those small perfect books I love to take on long flights. Mr. Winder is a Fleming fan, and he has an eye for those moments of pure stylistic pleasure that the novels offer. It’s in attempting to advance from annotated arcana to an argument that Mr. Winder’s new book comes a cropper.
He begins in the dark at the dawn of the Roger Moore imperium: “I am ten years old, sitting in a suburban English cinema. On the screen a man with a large chin and black roll-neck sweater pushes through jungle foliage…. A white woman has been tied to a post and a black man dressed in animal skins is laughing crazily and wielding a massive poisonous snake…. The man with the large chin starts shooting the black people.”
The fellow who lovingly compiled “My Name’s Bond…” suddenly seems a lot more sheepish about the whole business. He can’t even get through a list of the movies without collapsing in embarrassment: “The Man With the Golden Gun (1974), The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), Moonraker (1979) … I’m sorry. I just can’t go on it’s all so terrible. They’re roughly the same, come out at irregular intervals and tend to have the word Die in the title.”
Oh, dear. And this is before Mr. Winder has even got stuck into his big picture: the violence and racism and ugliness of the British Empire. Though he refers to “a sort of paroxysm of national self-loathing,” he would appear to be the principal evidence of it. And even then you vaguely suspect that he’s faking it. There are, broadly speaking, three reactions to Bond: those who dislike him; those who love him; and those who love him but feel obliged to deplore all the frightful imperialism, racism, alcoholism, chain smoking, snobbery, profoundly unsafe sex, etc. Mr. Winder elects to join this last category, which makes the book a glummer read than it ought to be, a kind of “Doctor No But...”
British audiences have never had any difficulty reconciling 007’s luster with their more general eclipse: The opening of “The Spy Who Loved Me,” when Bond skis off a cliff and opens his Union Jack parachute, is offered and understood as a kind of semi-parodic flag-waving. In the Roger Moore era, the film-makers took to ending the movie with a scene in which the queen or Mrs. Thatcher or some such would be waiting to congratulate Bond via satellite link only to be confronted by the old legover maestro doing the horizontal mambo with Holly Goodhead as an excuse for a final double-entendre. “What’s Bond doing?” “I think,” explains Q, looking at the radar rather than at Roger, “he’s attempting re-entry, sir.” Or: “Just keeping the British end up, sir.” Or a dozen others, as Roger Moore rogered more.
With the best will in the world, one can’t divine a lot of imperial self-doubt in the Bond oeuvre. And Mr. Winder, demonstrating the peculiar snobberies of the minor public schoolboy (if you’ll forgive a touch more snobbery), allows his obsessions to lead him astray—as in his assertion that these tales of Brit derring-do were viewed in America as “comedies of self-delusion.” Oh, really? So it’s not the babes and the gadgets and the car chases that caught the American eye? Just the huge market for post-imperial “comedies of self-delusion.” Who knew?
Poor old Winder. A genial gentleman-publisher of the patrician left, he seems to have missed the central feature of Bond’s character: his cool. Mr. Winder is not cool; he is over-heated to the point of rhetorical meltdown: his nation’s history is “despicable,” “repulsive,” “revolting and mad,” “sickening,” “nauseating,” “nauseating and absurd.” One feels that, instead of this shrill overkill, he might have taken a lesson from Blofeld et al. and expressed his loathing with an amused contempt—“I’m afraid you’re beginning to bore me, Mr. Bond”—before lowering him into the piranha tank.
There are some useful insights in “The Man Who Saved Britain” — the observation that Ken Adam’s Bond movie sets are so good that real location scenes such as the Vegas hotels of "Diamonds Are Forever" look wan by comparison. But otherwise, generalizing ever more wildly and hysterically, Mr. Winder manages to miss all his targets—Fleming, Bond and the British Empire. He seems an amiable self-deprecating cove, but so is Hugh Grant, and I wouldn’t fancy his chances trying to beat up Daniel Craig.
LOL. It took me a moment.
Not sure why Bond is such a significant iconic semi-archetype fictional character, but he is. In 20th century fiction I doubt there's any other fictional character that casts such a long shadow.
The smug nationalistic superiority of the British spy cadre is played for satire; Americans are bungling clods who do more damage than good. The Germans are all closet Nazis yearning for a return to their glory days. The French ... well, not EVERYTHING is parody ...
Every city has its Mardi Gras or Carnivale, and Bond just happens to get the assignment right at the peak of the tourist season. None of these stories ever happens somewhere ugly or un-scenic. And the agents sent to kill him -- how low a profile can the world's most famous spy keep? -- are either plug-ugly thugs or femmes fatale with an emphasis on "femmes."
It appears there is no end to the font of Steynisms, is there?
Isn't he wonderful. To think that this stuff goes on inside a human head is a source of wonder to me.
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